Creating More Sustainable Water
Systems by Taking Lessons from the
Energy Industry

Water and energy are critically interdependent, and just as energy is generated, distributed, and stored, doing the same with water could improve the resilience of both systems.

Aveteran water engineer was recently approached by a reporter and asked to summarize the state of water in
the United States. “Where is water going?”
the young reporter eagerly asked the veteran
expert. The water engineer replied, dryly,
“Downhill. Most of the time.”
Metaphorically, and literally, water
resources in the United States are in a state
of decline. Freshwater supplies are under
increasing stress due to the combined forces
of climate change and more intensive land
use. Droughts are dryer and longer, and
storms, when they come, are more violent.

In mountainous states like California, less and less precipitation falls in the form of snow (which steadily accumulates and slowly melts), and more falls as rain, which rushes down our rivers and out to sea. All this is made worse by burgeoning urbanization, which is replacing the amount of land that can absorb precipitation with more and more impermeable, man-made infrastructure.

Stress on our water systems puts stress on our energy systems. Why? For starters, water is a critical ingredient in many energy systems. It is required for oil and gas production, for cooling the nation’s power plants, and is used, directly, to generate hydropower. Curtailment of water supplies has led to reduction in power generation at several power plants in several states, and water supply limitations are fundamentally limiting domestic production in a number of oil and gas basins in the U.S.

Water is also a huge consumer of electricity:
it’s heavy, and moving it uphill requires
enormous expenditures of electricity and
massive pumping systems. In California a
whopping 19 percent of the total electrical
demand is used in some way to move or treat
water. Large, centralized water transportation
systems like the California Aqueduct consume
enormous amounts of electricity lifting water
nearly 2,000 feet on its journey to southern
California. And the myriad of groundwater
wells across the U.S. consume electrical power
every time a farmer chooses to pump water
from the ground. Water treatment plants in
urban environments are typically the largest
single energy user in towns and cities.

Distributed energy, distributed water

But hidden within this Gordian tangle
of interdependence lies some important
opportunities for the United States to use
science and technology to stabilize and
improve both our water and our energy
networks. The technologies our country has
developed to create and manage distributed
energy generation and distributed energy
storage can guide us to develop new
technologies to create distributed water
generation and distributed water storage.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
which has a long history of innovation in
energy technologies, has plunged into water
research in recent years with precisely this
framework in mind.

For example, it is becoming increasingly clear that distributed energy generation through rooftop solar will fundamentally alter how we design and operate our electrical grid. Distributed electrical generation allows us to produce significant quantities of electricity, much of which we can use locally to offset demands from the grid. But in order to balance the timing of the supply of renewable energy with the timing of demand, we need to develop more efficient and economical technologies for energy storage. Thus, the U.S. Department of Energy has had a longstanding and highly successful effort to improve the capabilities and cost of batteries. The fruits of